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Here I discuss 17 tips to running a great wrestling event. I have been around wrestling for over 20 years and have been to quite a few tournaments. You can learn something at every tournament you attend if you look for something positive. Here are 17 of my tips. If you have any other tips, post a comment under the blog posting. Enjoy…

1) The most important step is to secure your facility. Once your facility is secure you can start to work on the next step. Make sure you understand the politics of getting your facility and confirm that you actually have the facility. Get everything in writing as soon as possible especially if it is your first year. Most high schools say there is no charge to use the gym, but there usually are charges for the custodians or school employees required to be there. These can add up to $600 to $800 a day.

2) Get some help from your local high school team. We would pay the high school team to run the scoring tables. They have the expertise to keep score accurately and we had fewer complaints about scoring when the high school wrestlers ran the tables.

3) Get the word out. For Illinois, that is getting the tournament on the state web site. Many people visit our state web site to find out information. If affiliated with USA Wrestling, you can get on their schedule simply by sanctioning it early. We would typically get several wrestlers from out of state at our tournament. This was because the wrestlers had family in the area and could visit family on Saturday and wrestle on Sunday.

4)In Illinois, the state organization makes available its list of teams. We always sent fliers to the entire state and found several teams that traveled a long distance to our tournament. We would get several teams that we would not think to invite to our tournament by sending the fliers to the entire state.

5) Offer an incentive to pre-register. Most teams will not take advantage of the pre-registration. Offer $12 if you pre-register and $14 if you pay at the tournament. Don’t compete based on price. Be in the middle of tournament prices. Don’t set prices too low or too high.

6) Saying “no” your first year is critical. You do not want to over book your tournament. If the first year you run a tournament, the parents and coaches get out of their late, they will tell their friends the tournament was run horribly. However, the opposite is true, run a good tournament and they will tell everybody about it.

7)In order to figure out how many kids you can handle use 30 to 40 kids a mat. When you get to the 50 to 60 kids per mat, you are talking about a long tournament. Particularly your first year, try to stay around 30 to 35 kids a mat.

8)Use square mats, you will save space and not waste it by making circles so you can get quite a bit of wrestling space. Some coaches hate square mats, but they won’t be complaining when you get them out a little quicker because you were able to squeeze another mat or two out of your available mat space.

9)If you have different size mats, don’t simply cut all the mats in half. Use some of the space on your larger mats to make your smaller mats bigger in size. Also, use marking tape and make sure it is a color that is not on your mats. Marking tape can be bought at McMaster Car.

10) Do not run a round robin tournament. They take longer since every bracket will have all wrestlers wrestling. Using an 8-man bracket will reduce the number of matches your final round. Also, for the eight year olds and under, use a 4-man bracket. They will get two matches and should be out early in the afternoon. The kids and parents will appreciate getting out of your tournament early.

11)If possible, split the 5 and 6 year olds into a separate division.

12)Awards should be the best you can afford. A shirt to the first place winner really does not cost that much and you’ll have people talking about your tournament. I always saw our tournaments t-shirts during the season. If possible, award first to sixth place a medal.

13)Another key to running a good tournament is to make sure you do not have too many or too few kids. Try to get good numbers from your coaches. Ask them how many kids are on their roster and figure they will usually not have more than 50 to 60% participation. Some teams will have 80 to 90%. If a coach has 40 kids on his roster, chances are they will not bring 35 kids like he would like. I’d look to see what the teams were brining at other tournaments through out the year. At a typical tournament, we would have 15 to 20 teams. If each team’s count is off 5 kids that is 75 to 100 kids. At $12 an entry fee, gate fee, and concession stand revenues, each missing wrestler is close to $15 to $20 in profit. Much of your profit is in the last 100 wrestlers.

14) My last couple tournaments, I asked the coach if I asked you to guarantee a number how many kids would you have. That number was always significantly less then the first number.

15) Take care of your referees. They will talk about your tournament to other ref’s. Pay them well, but don’t pay them too well. If you run 10 mats (400 kids), get 12 refs for your tournament. An extra $10 or $20 a ref times 12 refs’ is $120 or $240 of profit. That extra money can be used to pay for uniforms.

16) Finally, the day of the tournament. Make sure you have enough scales at your tournament. In Illinois, the 8 & Unders are the largest group. We bought two scales from Walmart. These are fine for the little guys and will allow you to have 2 scales for the 8 & Unders, and then one scale for each of the other divisions.

17) We always asked the coaches into the bracketing room. This allows your tournament to start on time. The coaches have a vested interest in helping start the tournament. Plus if they have a complaint about the bracketing, you can remind the coach you invited him or her to the bracketing room.

Marketing your Wrestling Tournament

You must have a marketing strategy for your wrestling tournament. First you must decide when it is your coaches or wrestling teams decide what tournament they are going to attend. In Illinois, for youth tournaments, many of the tournaments fill up quickly so coaches must decide early which tournaments they are going to attend. So it is in your best interest to get your information to the coaches prior to the start of the tournament season, but not so early that the flier gets put in a pile or folder and never looked at again.

After you decide when, you need to decide what you are going to offer at your tournament. Not many people run varsity tournaments, I suspect the reason is they do not earn as much for the club as regular tournaments do, but require about the same amount of work. However, there is great prestige in running a first class tournament and if that is your number one goal you should pursue this goal.

Another type of tournament you can run is a rookie tournament. These always seem to fill up in Illinois. I think this is a great tournament to run, because it helps first and second year wrestlers have a good experience with the sport. There is no fun in getting beat week in and week out.

Another type is a regular tournament with no skill level designated. These are the most popular in Illinois, because they reach the broadest audience and all of your wrestlers can actually wrestle in the tournament. Parent help is critical to running a smooth tournament, and I suspect it may be difficult for you to convince all your experienced parents to work all day at a tournament that their wrestlers will not be experiencing.

Another important activity is to learn what other successful tournaments do to market their tournament. This can be done by talking with coaches at tournaments or calling up friends to see what they do to market their tournament. After the first couple of years in running a successful tournament, it will market itself and you will have strong word of mouth and a long line of returning teams each year.

For example, after interviewing coaches casually at tournaments, I found that they use the state’s website to find out the dates of tournaments that are close to them. Also, I found other tournaments mailed fliers to all of the state’s contacts. You never know if a team has an opening in their schedule and is willing to travel 45 to 90 minutes to get in another tournament (or if they are looking to get some competition in a different part of the state). Each year I did this, I found teams asking to come that I would have never even thought to invite. The last 100 kids are where you make most of your money. At that point, all of your fixed costs are paid for, refs, gym space, table help, etc so the last 100 kids are mostly profit.

Even more important then the information mentioned above, you don’t want to pick a date where there is another tournament close by that will compete with you, particularly if you are a new tournament. Why not pick a different weekend? This way you can both attend each other’s tournament and help out your sectional by offering another tournament that is close by on another weekend. The only exception to this rule is if it is a varsity tournament. If that is the case, you can run a JV tournament, because most teams (at least in Illinois) will not send first and second year kids to a strong varsity tournament. We used this strategy on a weekend of a very popular varsity tournament. No one really offered an option in our area for this weekend; we did and had lots of kids attend.

Benchmark the best tournaments marketing fliers. Why reinvent the wheel, chances are if it is the tenth annual tournament, they have figured out what information is required on a tournament flier. Each year we tried to improve the flier based on questions we received. One frequent question was a request for directions, so we put this on next years flier. Another was what awards were going to be given out. All of this information was on the tenth annual tournament, that we did not include the first year we ran a tournament. Avoid our mistakes and others that have been made, by looking at several different fliers and use the best parts of each flier.

Pick your awards carefully, it is important in your marketing of your tournament. We always awarded First through Fifth medals at the least. When we saw other tournaments were awarding trophies, we offered trophies for first and even stepped it up the following year with t-shirts. The kids love the awards they received and talked about them. Although no coaches will probably decide which tournament to bring their wrestlers to based on the awards, parents may decide to skip a tournament that has notoriously bad awards. There is not a tremendous amount of cost difference in providing nice awards as compared to cheap awards.

Next month look for keys to running the tournament smoothly, a discussion on the day of the tournament operations.

Good Luck with your tournament…Jeff Pape

So You Want To Run A Wrestling Tournament? - by Jeff Pape

So you want to run a wrestling a wrestling tournament? For the next couple months, I will discuss various aspects of running a successful tournament. You may ask what a successful tournament is, and that is one of the first things I will talk about. How do you define a successful tournament?

I believe it is just like anything else in life, it is a lesson I learned from my high school teachers. One in particular was my Freshmen English teacher who spoke at the beginning of the school year about the power of setting goals. The second was my wrestling coach, Charlie Farina, one of the winningest high school wrestling coaches in the nation. He never had us write down our goals on paper, but he was always asking us what we wanted to do after high school or accomplish at the end of the year. So getting back to how this relates to running a tournament, figure out what your goal or goals are.

Is your goal to make money? Is it to offer wrestlers an opportunity to wrestle on an open week end in your states wrestling calendar? Is it a last minute tournament you are putting together on a whim and a prayer? Is your goal to develop a prestigious state or national tournament? Depending on your goals, you will need to do different activities to meet your goals.

I will write about two of my goals, one was to make money and two was to offer a nice environment for both the wrestling fan and the wrestler. I wanted teams and parents to come back to my tournament year in and year out. One of the keys in developing this long term view was that I did not have a huge tournament the first year. I used the first year to get the kinks out of my system. We did have some kinks that first year, but we still managed to get out by 2:00 p.m. We had about 350 kids that first year, and after that we averaged about 500 kids with our max of 673 kids out the door at 4:30. The year we had 673 kids everyone hit their number of wrestlers, normally this does not happen. I will write more about this in next month’s column on marketing.

A few things our club did to make money for the long term was to decide on the awards we would use for all future tournaments. This allows you to roll over awards to the following year and you do not have old medals lying around from previous years. We gave away a t-shirt to the champion after our second year, nothing like advertising for your next tournament. Most who attended had a good experience, so it was well worth the cost (plus the kids loved them). It was just another way we tried to distinguish ourselves from any other tournament. We shopped at food stores that allowed us to return unopened food like boxes of candy bars, nachos, drinks or similar items. This allowed us to keep our concessions open through out the entire day. We always doubled our cost on the item, we did not do this our first year, but learned a very valuable lesson for the years to come. You need to build in a profit margin in your concessions. A final note, we generally manned the gates to charge people through the end of the day. Most people understood we were doing it as a fund raiser, so they did not have a problem with it.

The second goal of making it a nice environment was the planning of what side of the bleachers would be open, arranging the mats and scorer’s tables for optimal viewing, creating seats to eat lunch at, having enough food throughout the day, and basic things that you can come up with that you like when you spend all day at a tournament. I am sure you and your parents can come up with a list of things you liked and disliked about a tournament. Another thing we did that most clubs do not, is we asked for a coach from every team to come in and help bracket. This helps you in two ways, one if you have to ask the coach a question about the wrestler’s skill level, he/she is right there and if there are any questions about why this kid was put here or there, I was able to say, “A coach from your team was invited into the bracketing room for this very reason.” Not too mention, I always needed the help writing up brackets and the coaches had a vested interest in getting the tournament to start and was properly bracketed.

Next month, look for ideas on how to market your tournament. In December we will talk about operating your tournament and in January we will have our top twenty list.

Just like in a wrestling match, a line can show which youth wrestling tournaments are well run or can show you which tournaments are poorly run. A line is the result of wrestlers, parents, or fans coming in faster then they are going out. For example, during weigh-ins, if you are not weighing kids in as fast as they are coming in, a line will develop. A line signals a potential problem. Catch the line while the build up of people is small.

When a line does develop, you should look to add more people to help speed up the weigh-in process. Many times kids are not ready to weigh-in at the scale, don’t have their weigh-in cards ready, don’t have their records on their weigh-cards, etc. All of these things can be done while they are in line, they should not be done when it is their turn to step on the scale. Another way to speed up the line, you can have several people writing the weights on the wrestlers arms. This way the scale is being used more efficiently. A final key is to make sure you have enough scales in the weigh-in room. Often times in Illinois, the 8 year-old and under division is the largest numbers of kids, and tournaments only allocate one scale to this division. When I would run a tournament we would have two scales for 8 and unders and one scale for each of the other divisions. If possible, use a digital scale, weigh-ins take a lot longer with a manual scale.

As long as all wrestlers are weighing in on the same scale, we have used Tanita $80 bathroom scales to weigh kids in. Nothing will stall a tournament then a poorly planned weigh-in. After all, you can’t start bracketing until all the kids are weighed in.

Same logic goes with bracketing; make sure the age group you plan to start out with has enough people working on it so you can start your tournament on time. We always invited coaches to help with bracketing, because they have a vested interest in getting the tournament started. They don’t want to be waiting around at 9:15 wondering why the tournament did not start. Plus if there is a question about bumping a kid up or down, the coach is there ready to answer questions.

One thing we did before the kids were called to a bullpen was to post the brackets so the kids had an idea of what letter bracket they were assigned. This sped up the process of calling kids names since most knew where to go when they got into the bullpen area. We would let the coaches with kids in the bracket walk out to an open mat that was assigned by one of our tournament volunteers. Never back up too many kids at the table, because then you have fans that can’t see and unnecessary distractions for the table workers. You do want to back up at least one bracket so the wrestling does not need to stop at the table.

A final comment about concession stands. Make sure you have enough food, with most tournament sites near a Sam’s Club, there is no reason to run out of food. Sam’s Club will take back unsold pop, nachos, and many other unopened food items so why run out? And, just like the lines at weighins, if you see a line at the concession stand there is a problem. Is there only one person taking money? Are there kids back there distracting their parents from helping others? Are enough helpers pulling the food from the back? All of these things will cause lines to build up. One way we remedied this was to have a self serve display for packaged food so a person could pick up a candy bar or a piece of fruit and say this is all I want. You don’t need as many people in the back taking orders if they can help themselves and have their cash ready to pay you. If you have long lines at concession stands, you are losing money. Many coaches and parents will not wait in line to eat at your tournament and will simply wait till they leave to eat.

Running a tournament is not easy, but it does not have to be too difficult. Every tournament I was at, I tried to learn something to bring back to our tournaments…keep your eyes open and learn from others. These were just a few examples of “lines” you should look for when running a tournament. Moving volunteers to different areas to help make things move quicker can reduce most lines. Long lines at weigh-ins, spectator lines, concession stand lines, etc are going to effect what people will think of your tournament. Make sure you have enough help at these key areas and your tournament will run smoother and people will be talking about how well run your tournament is. Positive word of mouth goes back to the previous article I wrote about marketing your tournament. Take care of the wrestlers, coaches, and fans that support your tournament or someone else will…